Brown Act Pulls Plug on Networking

The California open meetings law has butted heads with a computer conferencing system in Santa Monica, and the law has won.

Santa Monica City Atty. Robert M. Myers has ordered that the conferencing program, accessible only to members of the school board and a citizens advisory committee, be shut down because it violated the Brown Act. The act requires that governmental bodies meet, discuss and decide their business in public.

A “closed conference only available to a select body” was, in effect, “an ongoing dialogue process that violated the Brown Act,” Myers said recently. “It was set up by a body subject to the Brown Act to discuss issues that that body was established” to decide. “That indicated they were, in effect, having a meeting process.”

The conference system was set up in March on the city’s Public Electronic Network for use by the Santa Monica High School Study Committee, some other citizens on a subcommittee task force and members of the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District board. The committee was appointed by the board last fall to examine the curriculum, student population and other aspects of the school.

School board President Patricia Hoffman said last week that the district was abiding by Myers’ order. She said the idea for the closed conference came during a study committee meeting.

“It sounded like a good idea,” she said, “just to facilitate communication.” She said she did not realize that the committee might be subject to the 1953 Brown Act.

“It started as a benign idea,” she said. “I thought of it in terms of a rough draft.”